The air in Port Lauderdale just before dawn was a thick, salty soup that clung to Leo's skin. At twenty, he was already intimate with the weight of a Florida morning, the way it promised heat and hardship in the same breath. His sneakers made soft, squelching sounds on the damp wooden planks of the dock, a rhythm as familiar as his own heartbeat. To his left, the silhouettes of multi-million dollar yachts stood against the paling sky, their masts like a forest of sleeping giants. This was his time, the narrow window between the night's last revelers stumbling home and the day's first workers arriving, when the world was quiet and the water held its secrets close.
He switched on his metal detector, the Garrett Ace 250 he'd bought second-hand with two weeks' worth of dock-worker pay. Its low hum was a prayer. He started his usual patrol along the public beach adjacent to the marina, the coil sweeping a hypnotic arc over the sand. Beep. A bottle cap. Beep. A pull-tab. The usual detritus of a thousand forgotten days.
But today felt different. A pressure was building in the air, a static charge that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up. The sky to the east, which should have been bleeding orange and pink, was a bruised, greenish-grey. A line storm was brewing, fast.
"Just a little longer," he muttered to himself, his voice swallowed by the growl of distant thunder.
He moved closer to the waterline, where the tide had churned the sand all night. A flicker of lightning illuminated the scene, and in that split second, he saw it: a glint of gold, half-buried where the waves lapped at a storm drain outlet. It was a man's bracelet, heavy, nautical-themed. Real.
Another bolt of lightning, this one closer, forking down towards the water. The thunder cracked instantly, a physical blow that shook the ground. Leo lunged for the bracelet, his fingers closing around the cold, wet metal.
The world turned white.
A searing, incandescent pain shot up his arm, through his spine, and exploded in his skull. It wasn't the simple shock of a live wire; it felt like the lightning itself had chosen him, pouring into him, filling him with a raw, cosmic energy. He was thrown backwards, his body convulsing, the smell of ozone and burnt hair filling his nostrils. His last conscious thought was that the sky had fallen on him.
---
He came to with a gasp, his mouth full of wet sand. The storm was retreating, rumbling its way inland, leaving behind a steady, drenching rain. He pushed himself up, expecting agony, expecting to be a charred husk. But there was no pain. Only a… a humming. A vibration that came from within, a new layer of existence laid over the old one.
He blinked, and the world shifted.
Without trying, he could feel the space around him. Not see it, but sense it in his mind. Ten meters in every direction—the exact distance was an instinctual knowledge—was a sphere of perception. He knew where every buried bottle cap was, every lost key, the precise shape of a silver chain coiled like a sleeping snake six meters away and two feet down. It was a 3D map painted on the back of his eyelids.
He focused, staring hard at a yacht anchored fifty meters out. His awareness snapped forward in a narrow beam, piercing the hull. He couldn't see through it, but he could sense the space inside: the empty cabins, the layout of the galley, a dense, metallic object—a safe?—bolted to the floor in the master suite.
"What… what is this?" he whispered, his voice raw.
A pitiful chirping sound cut through the rain and his racing thoughts. Huddled under a splintered bench was a seagull, one wing bent at a sickening angle, its black eye fixed on him with an intelligence that felt new, that felt directed.
And he understood. The sound wasn't just noise. It was a wave of pure, simple emotion: Fear. Pain. Helplessness.
The understanding was as immediate and undeniable as the ability to scan. The bird was hurt, and it was asking for help. Not in words, but in a primal signal his new-wired brain could decode.
Hesitantly, Leo crawled over. The gull flinched but didn't try to flee. It just looked at him, and that same emotional signal washed over him again: Help.
The third ability announced itself then, a pull in his gut, a reservoir of energy he hadn't known was there. He reached out a trembling hand, not to touch the bird, but to hover over its broken wing. He didn't know how to do it; he just willed it. He focused on the image of the bone knitting, the torn muscle mending, the pain subsiding.
A warm, golden light—visible only to him—bloomed from his palm and enveloped the seagull's wing. He felt a massive drain, as if someone had pulled a plug in his soul. His energy, his strength, poured out of him. He grew dizzy, his vision spotting, a profound and gnawing hunger erupting in his stomach. It felt like he hadn't eaten for a week.
The light faded. The seagull chirped, a different sound now. Relief. Gratitude. It flexed its wing, once, twice, then beat it powerfully against the rain-soaked air. With a final, clear look at Leo, it took off, soaring into the grey sky without a backward glance.
Leo collapsed onto the sand, trembling with exhaustion. The scanning ability was still there, a background hum. The understanding of the chattering birds now waking up in the palms was a constant, faint murmur in his mind. The healing power was a drained, aching void in his core.
He had gone out a poor orphan looking for scrap. He had come back… something else.
He looked down at his hand, the one that had channeled the light. His stomach growled, a deep, animalistic demand for replenishment. The gold bracelet was still clutched in his other fist. It meant nothing now.
Everything had changed. The world was suddenly, terrifyingly, magnificently larger. And he was desperately, overwhelmingly hungry.